Donald Trump's guilty verdict sent TV news into overdrive. Fox News' Jeanine Pirro lost it
Cable-news anchors broke out the hyperbole after former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies on Thursday afternoon.
Hyperbole that was, for once, appropriate. No one can overstate the magnitude of these convictions, though the talking heads on Fox News certainly put their own weird MAGA spin on it. Someone needs to get Jeanine Pirro a cold drink and a couch. Whatever is beyond hyperbole is what she was dipping into. Words like “unhinged rant” come to mind.
Think of what has transpired. Trump is not just the first former president tried and convicted of a felony (or of 34 of them). He is also the presumptive Republican nominee for president in the 2024 election. It was, as Jake Tapper said on CNN, “an unbelievable moment in American history.”
I guess. I’m getting kind of tired of this sort of history. It’s more like every time you turn on the TV you wander into Bizarro World.
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'The nation is collectively holding its breath'
What a day of TV news. All the networks kept a clock on-screen as the jury deliberated Wednesday and Thursday. This was a reminder that there is no treading water like a cable-news anchor trying to pass the time while waiting for something to happen.
But once the jury told the judge it had a verdict, the energy changed.
“I think it’s fair to say that the nation is collectively holding its breath right now,” Dana Bash said on CNN.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say the eyes of the nation and the world are on this New York courtroom right now,” Ari Melber said on MSNBC.
And you know what? They were right.
It was a real butterflies-in-the-stomach moment. Of course, no one had any idea what the verdict was at that point, though the quick decision favored conviction. “I actually thought it would be yesterday,” Andrew McCarthy said on Fox News. “I don’t think it’s good for the president.”
Note to Mr. McCarthy: Trump is not the president. But he was right about the not-good part.
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The Trump trial was stranger than fiction
What made the whole thing even stranger from a TV perspective was how little it resembled what we’ve come to expect from years of shows like “Law & Order.” We didn’t see a jury foreman read the verdicts. We watched Tapper and the other anchors read them off as they got them.
Maybe that sounds less compelling. It was not. It was more like how Nicole Wallace described it on MSNBC: “A political car crash that rolled out in slow motion.”
With the verdict in, the dissection began. The what’s-it-all-mean aspect was fairly routine, if only because Trump has dragged national politics and the media that covers it through such a hellscape of absurdity that even the biggest moments threaten to lose some of their impact. Which is the whole idea on his part, of course.
Not this time, though.
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Think, in addition to Trump’s convictions, what else the trial entailed: testimony about hush money paid to a porn star to keep her quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.
A primer on the sleazy world of “catch and kill,” the practice of buying rights to a story and then never publishing it, a common practice of the National Enquirer, which also planted negative stories about Trump’s opponents in the 2016 Republican primary — really trashy stuff, only now the people he smeared are his sycophants.
Daily screeds from Trump about how crooked the judge was, how the whole thing is rigged against him. Screeds he continued after he left court on Thursday as a convicted felon, as well. "I did nothing wrong," that sort of thing.
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Fox News shifted into Trump-defense mode
If CNN and MSNBC were going the huge-story route, Fox News immediately shifted into Trump-defense mode, a remarkable thing to watch. Jonathan Turley was “saddened” by the verdict. I’ll bet.
McCarthy, who played it fairly straight before the verdict, went from Jekyll to Hyde in short order.
“It’s a historic trial of a former president of the United States by his partisan adversaries,” he said. “Whatever you think of the results it’s inconceivable in New York that anyone else other than Donald Trump would ever have been indicted this way.”
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Jeanine Pirro lost it on Fox News
But this was nothing compared to Pirro, who attended the trial occasionally. She wound up and they just let her go. It was stunning TV.
She started out towing the Fox News line, that the judge wouldn’t let Trump’s attorneys put on the defense they needed. “This is a new era in America, and I think it goes against the ilk of who we are as Americans and our faith in the criminal justice system,” she said.
Pirro was just getting started. She ranted about the trial, about the judge, about the prosecutor, who she falsely claimed is funded by George Soros — about anything she could think of, really. Her voice rose. Her speech accelerated. She was blasting out things like, “This is an anti-Trump judge! An anti-Trump prosecutor! America’s going to respond to this! This is a gut punch.”
It was certainly a Trump punch. It was indeed historic. And with more trials on the horizon (though none likely before the election), we may see history repeat itself.
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